Robert Goulet, recently of Emerald Nuts Super Bowl ad fame has been hospitalized for the past 22 days in Los Angeles in critical condition. The Tony, Emmy and Grammy winning star suffered shortness of breath a few months ago and was recently diagnosed with Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis, a fatal condition. his one chance of survival is a lung transplant.

This time last year Jonathan Schoenberg of TDA Advertising & Design conducted a guest lecture in Boulder, CO and smashed the disruptive cell phone of a student with hardly a pause in his sentence. Naturally, somebody recorded it.

The video is startling but not nearly as exciting as the one of the UCLA student getting repeatedly tased. Even so, in 12 months it's made multiple public TV and news cameos on ABC Nightly News, MSNBC, CNN and O'Reilly Factor, not even counting appearances in New Zealand and Canada. To date it straddles nearly 3 million views and is the 16th most-discussed video ever.

One has to wonder what idiot over at Bacon's came up with this lame idea. Recently, it sent an email out to its subscribers offering...wait for it...a DVD with all the Super bowl ads on it...for $500! Does Bacon's really think the PR industry, or anyone for that matter, hasn't heard of iFilm, Yahoo, AOL, YouTube, MySpace, Advertising Age, USA Today, the DVR or any of the thousands of other places Super Bowl commercial can be seen for...oh...$500 less than $500? Apparently not as it seems to think there are people in this world that will cough up $500 for what everyone else can get for free. Whacked. Truly whacked.

UPDATE: Competitrack is doing it too. Are we missing something here? Do people actually pay for this sort of thing?

Apparently, commercials now cause suicide. You've heard us rail against those cause groups for every conceivable issue and ailment before and we're going to do it again. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has asked GM to yank its Deutsch LA-created Robot commercial in which a dejected robot is fired and commits suicide...in a fucking dream! For fuck's sake. When will this idiocy end? When will people realize we're talking about advertising here and not brain surgery? When will people get their head out of their asses and laugh when a piece of humor is placed in front of them? It's a robot...in a commercial. Hello?

Now that we've spent the better part of a week pointlessly bitching about which Super Bowl spot was the best, we might consider giving the honor to an ad that, though intended, never appeared during the game. You might remember the guy, now revealed to be Rand Fishkin of Seattle, behind MySuperProposal who was attempting to raise money to buy a Super Bowl ad in which he had planned to ask his girlfriend, Geraldine DeRuiter, to marry him. Well, he wasn't able to raise the $2.6 million needed to purchase a Super Bowl spot and began talking to advertisers to support his effort as well as to CBS who were considering running the spot.

Unfortunately when half time rolled around CBS called to say the spot would not, in fact, air. Undeterred and with a $3,000 gift from his mother, Fishkin bought a local spot on Seattle's KSTW Tuesday night during Geraldine's favorite show, Veronica Mars.

- Cynopsis Reports, "CBS Sports had a super night Sunday with Super Bowl XLI averaging a fast national household rating/share of 42.6/64 from 627p-1004p. The 9-930p time period earned the highest rating/share of 45.0/65. Super Bowl XLI was the second most-watched Super Bowl ever, averaging 93.15 million viewers. Sunday's NFL championship telecast also ranks third overall as the most watched program in television history after the series finale of M*A*S*H and Super Bowl 30."

- MediaPost reports, "A total of 58% of Super Bowl advertisers, some of whom paid as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot, also purchased pay-per-click search ads on their brand names--up from 42% last year, according to Reprise."

- Adland has the story on a Swedish teaser poster campaign that was hijacked by a porn company who took all the glory for it leaving the originator of the advertising, SJ Train, up the creek.

Apparently, the backlash over the Snickers Super Bowl commercial in which two men end up kissing after eating a Snickers bar from opposite ends was too much for the company to take and, as a result, the candy maker has taken down the commercial's accompanying website, afterthekiss.com. Typing in the URL simply redirects to the Snickers site.

While we liked this spot purely for its shock value, there's a faintly high probability this will have a very real negative affect on sales. Can you imagine the looks one will now receive from the checkout clerk when they buy a Snickers bar? That's just way too much snickering for most people to take and there's plenty of other perfectly good candy choices with far less embarrassment attached to them.

Naming the best Super Bowl commercial is, at best, uselessly subjective and wholly irrelevant but we're going to do it anyway. And, in a shocker, we're going to agree with Advertising Age's bob Garfield and dub the Emerald Nuts Robert Goulet commercial our favorite. It's just twisted and quirky enough for us to appreciate and, not to be dismissed (although it usually is with Super Bowl ads), did a pretty good job of sliding some product benefit into the ad. So, Bob, what do you think? More importantly, what does everyone else think? Are we nuts? Oops. Sorry. Anyway, both of us (Angela and Steve) thought it was the best so we're going to honor it the Adrants Favorite for this year. The ad was developed by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco and was directed by the kooky and famed Perlorian Brothers.

As Sunday turns into Monday and time allows for the additional digestion and review of Super Bowl commercials, Bud Light's slapping ad has us laughing out loud this morning. When we viewed it during the game along with the insanity of the rest of the event, we didn't have time to enjoy the very hilarious wink/nod embedded in that ad. You all, of course, remember the Agency.com YouTube video fiasco in which Tom Ajello's fist bump became the signature of something...um...less than positive about the ad business. Well, wasn't it hilarious to see that very same notion become the basis of the Bud Light Slapping ad in which a guy, in response to an offered fist bump, says, "Yo, Steve, fist bump is out man!"

After that, the commercial turns into a humorous slap-fest but the funniest part of the ad is the end when the old dude (ad exec? hmm) offers up a fist bump and says to the young dude, "Nice job in there, Larson. You saved the account" to which the young dude responds by slapping the old dude. There's no way this commercial's creative concepting occurred without mention of Agency.com and its famouos fist bump. Nice work, guys.